Histamine Intolerance From A Spiritual Perspective

Histamine Intolerance from a spiritual perspective is good news: It means no junk food by all means. It is actually the perfect way to avoid food you should not eat anyways, based on the principles of Yoga Diet and Ayurveda. From a spiritual viewpoint, you are doing the right thing: Not eating junk. Here’s why.

What is Histamine Intolerance?

In medical terms histamine intolerance is a food intolerance like fructose malabsorption, or lactose intolerance. When your histamine levels get too high, your body shows a variety of symptoms like headache, depression, nausea, diarrhea, all kinds of rushes, tissue swelling, general pain, fatigue… Short, you start to feel quite unwell. And before you finally find out you just have a diamine oxidase deficiency (the natural antagonist of histamine), you most probably thought having something else. Some kind of mysterious tropical disease no one ever heard about. Indeed, never google your symptoms.

Food to avoid when dealing with Histamine Intolerance

Everyone reacts differently to food and have different histamine tolerance levels. So, one person with histamine intolerance can tolerate certain amounts of a specific food the other person with histamine intolerance cannot. And some days you may tolerate food you cannot on others.

Here is a short, non-exclusive list of histamine rich foods:

• alcohol like red wine, champagne, whiskey, beer
• spinach
• seafood
• aged cheese
• tomato
• chocolate
• everything which is stored in cans
• everything which is stored long
• sausage and salami
• processed food in general
• citric acid
• citrus fruits
• walnuts, almonds, …
• everything which was cooked, stored in the fridge and then rehashed
• bananas with dark spots
• ……

The Principles of Yoga Diet and Ayurveda

There is this food we are used to eat, and there is food. When I first learned about my symptoms and their connection to histamine intolerance, it took me by surprise that most of the listed food I never really enjoyed and even avoided as a child.

But the most astounding part was the similarities to yoga diet: Most of the food to avoid when dealing with histamine intolerance is food which is considered not pure enough for Yogis and Brahmans. From a spiritual perspective, it could not get any better than that.

Though traditional Yoga Philosophy is not telling what and what not to eat, there are three central Ayurvedic principles to classify food:

The three Gunas (Qualities)

Sattva: Sattva is the quality of pureness, clarity, unity, oneness and balance.

Rajas: Rajas is activity, passion, individualism and movement. It is neither good nor bad.

Tamas: Tamas stands for the principle of imbalance, chaos, destruction, violence and ignorance.

The three Gunas and Diet

Based on these qualities, you can qualify food. But first, to give a better understanding of this, there is one thing important to know. Brahmans must not in any form come in contact with death and sickness. Therefore, in the traditional Yoga Philosophy, meat-eating was considered unclean. But as this is said to be not true for the Kali Yuga we are currently living in, I will cover this aspect in another article.

When you now look at the list of food to avoid, you can see that food, which is not fresh anymore, contains lots of histamine. It has already started rotting, though it may still be consumable.

With this knowledge in the back of our mind, let’s look at the Gunas again and their relation to food and histamine intolerance.

Sattva

As Sattva is the purest quality of the cosmic principle, sattvic food is pure, fresh, and clean. All food which is bright in colour, comes from natural sources and is not spicy, is sattvic food.

White rice, fresh (really fresh) fruits, vegetable which haven’t been in the fridge for long, and Ghee. Depending on your viewpoint also milk, honey, and fresh eggs.

Rajas

Fruits which are stored too long like bananas with spots and citric fruits are rajasic food. Citric fruits mostly because they can be stored a long time. Basically any fruit you have at home could easily become rajasic, the same goes for vegetables.

Spices like onion and garlic, cinnamon, salt, pepper and others are also rajasic, though they have healing potential. Poultry, fish, cheese and yogurt are also rajasic.

Tamas

Tamasic food should be avoided at all costs, they more when you are histamine intolerant. Tamasic food is everything which is too, way too spicy and overripe- even fruits and vegetables.

Food like aged cheese or salami or ham. Alcohol and dark meat from mammals are as well tamasic, the same goes for processed food.

As you can see, most of the food to avoid when dealing with histamine intolerance are also to avoid in Yoga Diet, because they are either rajasic or tamasic. You may tolerate, even when sensitive to histamine, a certain amount of rajasic food, especially when you are eating lots of sattvic food.

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